Natalia Borisovna Kirillova
B.N. Yeltsin Ural Federal University, Yekaterinburg, Russia. Email: urfo@bk.ru
Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.07
First published: June 19, 2022 | Area: Film Studies | License: CC BY-NC 4.0
(This article is published under Volume 14, Number2, 2022)
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The Concept of Self-Sacrifice in the Philosophy of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Work
Abstract
The article analyzes the fundamentals of the moral philosophy of Andrei Tarkovsky, a unique Russian film director, thinker, and art theorist whose films are recognized as masterpieces of screen culture along with the works of M. Antonioni, I. Bergman, L. Buñuel, L. Visconti, A. Kurosawa, F. Truffaut, F. Fellini, S. Eisenstein, and others. The subject under study is the concept of self-sacrifice in the works of Tarkovsky as a distinctive “code” of his spiritual heritage. Creating his own original artistic world, Tarkovsky dwelled upon such vital philosophical categories as “life and death”, “faith and faithlessness”, “man’s spiritual existence”, “problems of conscience”, “self-sacrifice”, etc. This is evidenced not only by his screen works, but also by archives, diaries, and theoretical works, based on which the author provides an interpretation of the philosophy of Andrei Tarkovsky’s work focusing on the concept of self-sacrifice and the specifics of its artistic interpretation.
Keywords: Tarkovsky, screen culture, philosophy of creativity, human spiritual existence, archetypal image, the concept of self-sacrifice.
Introduction
The relevance of the present study is due to the fact that the globalization era at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries posed several social and philosophical problems to the humanities, many of which are in one way or another linked to the crisis of modern civilization and human spiritual existence – the very issues that had always been the focus of “the stalker of world cinema” Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) (Iaropolov, 2012). The controversy around his work does not subside to this day and not only in the film industry. In a compelling study analyzing the poetics and hermeneutics of Tarkovsky’s creativity, Cerwyn Moore (2009, p. 60) states that his works (both screen and theoretical) “can be used to develop the interpretive canon in global politics”.
Identifying and analyzing the concept of self-sacrifice in the moral philosophy of Andrei Tarkovsky, we raise the relevant issues of modern science and theology. The methodical foundation for the study is the interdisciplinary approach incorporating the theoretical aspects of philosophy and aesthetics, cultural history, and linguocultural studies, which allows for a comprehensive study of the examined problem. The material for theoretical analysis comprises the texts of not only Tarkovsky’s screen works but also the scientific works disclosing the foundations of his moral philosophy allowing him to reproduce his imaginative picture of the world: “Archives, Documents, Memoirs” (Volkova, 2002), the essay “Sculpting in Time” (Tarkovskij, 1985), “Martyrology. Diaries (1970-1986)” (Tarkovskii, 2008), and others.
Tarkovsky belongs to the class of creators for whom “figurativeness” is the most adequate means of embodying the deep intuition regarding the existence and human fate in our imperfect world. This view is close to the idea of D. Salynskii (2010) who, determining the ontological status of Tarkovsky’s films, notes that “his works are both text and reality and yet, at the same time, are neither of those” (p. 513).
The researcher proceeds from the fact that Tarkovsky denied the possibility of a semiotic approach to his works, “considering them to be phenomena of immediate reality”, that is, “the world emerging in the frame of the screen” was more real to him than the world outside of it (Salynskii, 2010, p. 513-514).
S. Freilikh notes that Tarkovsky’s becoming as an artist coincided with the period when literature and art, essentially creative thinking itself, were tremendously influenced by philosophy and natural sciences, and science seemingly sidelined art. Tarkovsky “turned out to be sensitive to the new reality, when the impact of technological progress severed human connections not only with the present but also with history, not only with society but also with nature itself” (Freilikh, 2002, p. 276).
The problem field of this study is the artistic methods behind the creation of Tarkovsky’s authorial world. As a man of faith, he sought answers to the question “how to live?” in art, as well as in the Bible. L. Aleksander (1989), a Swedish translator who worked with Tarkovsky on his last film, later published his answer:
“Creating art is like living. You can’t teach someone how to live well, but you can tell them how not to live badly. And it’s beautifully described in the Bible. Read the Bible” (p. 32).
This possibly explains why in Tarkovsky’s lifetime, his work was more deeply appreciated by the Western community compared to the Soviet Union where religion was forbidden. Tarkovsky was described as a unique artist by such famous world’s cultural figures as J.P. Sartre, I. Bergman, A. Moravia, T. Guerra, A. Kurosawa, S. Nykvist, and others. A well-known publicist Deepro Roy (2015) even published an essay in which 16 famous world art-house directors including Andrei Tarkovsky evaluate one another. Carmen Gray (2015), German critic and journalist, considering Tarkovsky one of the “true masters of cinema”, emphasizes that according to the 2012 Sight & Sound survey “on the best films of all time”, “Andrei Rublev”, “The Mirror”, and “Stalker” were among the world’s top 30 critics and directors, thus proving “the reverence Tarkovsky still inspires”.
As noted above, the key concept of Tarkovsky’s philosophy is “self-sacrifice”, which is evidenced not only by the appearance of the sacrifice motif in all his films, but also the frequent references to this theme in his diaries, articles, and interviews. The archetype of self-sacrifice is known to date back to ancient times. Many of the world’s peoples had cults of sacrifice serving as a basis for numerous myths about heroes sacrificing themselves for peace, to maintain the harmony of existence. Christianity exalted the divine significance of self-sacrifice, making it the goal of human salvation.
This idea, same as the striving for perfection, was among the most vital for Tarkovsky (1985):
“I am an advocate of art that carries within it a yearning for the ideal, that expresses a longing for it. I am for an art that gives a person Hope and Faith. And the more hopeless is the world described by an artist, the more, perhaps, one must feel the ideal opposed to it – otherwise, it would simply be impossible to live…” (p. 218-220).
The beginning of Andrei Tarkovsky’s creative path came at a time when the era of Stalinist totalitarianism began to crumble and a “new wave” of Soviet cinema emerged. At the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, the whole world learned the names of such directors as S. Bondarchuk (“Fate of a Man”, “War and Peace”), M. Kalatozov and S. M. Kalatozov (“The Cranes Are Flying”), G. Chukhrai (“Ballad of a Soldier”), M. Romm (“Ordinary Fascism”), and others. This cohort of filmmakers was soon to be joined by a young graduate of the VGIK with his own vision of the drama of war.
“An innocent victim of war”
In “Ivan’s Childhood” (1962), the protagonist cannot wrap his mind around the peripeteia of war and peace. Based on V. Bogomolov’s novel “Ivan”, the film shifts the action from the external to the internal sphere: its theme is not the boy soldier’s feat but the analysis of the complex metamorphosis of the teenager’s soul. Combining the techniques of poetic cinema with a brutal, almost documentary depiction of the realities of war, Tarkovsky achieves a strong effect (Figure 1).
Through the prism of a split world, through the differences between the hero’s past and present, the director derives his formula for the theme of “man and war” with its unnaturalness and anti-humanism. Tarkovsky’s tragedy of Ivan is found in that he is displaced from his human axis by an unchildish feeling of hatred burning inside him, a thirst for revenge. Hence the “black tree by the river” is the “tree of death” (Zorkaia, 2012, p. 27) – not a speculative image but an archetypal symbol.
In the mythology of the ancient Slavs, a tree was a symbol of Life. A withered tree was associated with woe and doom. It is no coincidence that myths often used such trends as “the tree of life”, “the tree of knowledge”, “the tree of ascent”, “the tree of the soul”, “the tree of death”, etc. (Afanasiev, 2014).
For this reason, in “Ivan’s Childhood”, the director repeatedly shows the shot of a black, charred tree with children playing beside it. This image has many meanings: it is both the “shot childhood” of Ivan (Zorkaia, 2012, p. 27), the souls of the children who died in the war, and the souls of the children who were not born because of the terrible war. The view of Jean-Paul Sartre on this film in his open letter to the editors of the Italian newspaper Unita is interesting. He emphasized its universal human meaning:
“…Who is Ivan? A madman, a monster, a little hero? In reality, he is the most innocent victim of war, a boy who is impossible not to love, who was nurtured by violence and absorbed it. The Nazis killed Ivan the moment they killed his mother and wiped out the villagers. However, he continues to live. But to live in the past… Credit must be given to Tarkovsky for showing so convincingly that for this suicidal child, there is no distinction between day and night… The little victim knows that what he needs is the war that spawned him, the blood, the vengeance. The road of love is closed here forever…” (Freilikh, 2002, p. 452-453).
The film “Ivan’s Childhood” which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival – the Golden Lion of St. Mark – and collected fifteen more prestigious awards at various international festivals became the “calling card” of the young Tarkovsky.
The artist and the era
The film “Andrei Rublev” (1966), the script for which was co-written by Tarkovsky and Andrei Konchalovsky, unravels the philosophy of Russian history in the first half of the 15th century – one of the most contradictory periods of medieval Russia at the end of the Tatar-Mongol yoke and the internecine strife of the Russian princes. Tarkovsky (1985) wrote:
“…The goal of our work lies in reconstructing the real world of the 15th century for the modern viewer, i.e. present this world in a way that would not make the viewer feel the “monumental” and museum exoticism neither in costumes, nor in the language, or the everyday life, or the architecture. To reach the truthfulness of direct observation, the “physiological” truth, so to speak, we had to deviate from the archaeological and ethnographic truth” (p. 228).
This proves that “Andrei Rublev” was not filmed in the tradition of the historical and biographical genre; is a philosophical parable about the meaning of creativity, the artist’s responsibility to society, and the triumph of the human spirit (Figure 2).
The film is constructed as a sequence of spiritual trials for the hero (the script was initially titled “The Passion According to Andrei”) disintegrating into a series of novellas. It concentrates the moral and philosophical problems closest to Tarkovsky – personality and history, the artist and power, freedom and moral choice, faith, betrayal, and conscience, which makes this film “a true key to understanding the entire work of Tarkovsky” (Evlampiev, n.d.).
The main theme of “Andrei Rublev”, similar to other Tarkovsky’s films, is the exploration of the unbreakable bond between a person and the outside world and spiritual existence, which brings Tarkovsky’s moral quest closer to the philosophical ideas of I. Kant, G. Hegel, F. Nietzsche, N. Berdiaev, I. Ilyin, S. Frank, E. Fromm, P. Sorokin, and others.
The iconic image for Tarkovsky is the archetype of Jesus Christ as the Ideal Man. In “Andrei Rublev”, the Christ on Calvary becomes a symbol of the Russian man who bears his cross on the sacrificial path for the sake of the spiritual perfection of people. Tarkovsky’s Christ is a symbol of his moral and philosophical idea. It is for that reason that the director shows him not in biblical clothes but in a Russian cotton shirt and sandals and in the realities of medieval Russia. This biblical-mythological motif in the film not only indicates the “collective unconscious” (C.G. Jung) but also reflects the very philosophical concept of sacrifice as the basis of a spiritual feat in the name of people.
The archetype of the Cross in Tarkovsky’s work embodies the idea of the structure of the world. As argued by C.G. Jung (2014) who studied the religions of different peoples of the world,
“The cross signifies order as opposed to the unsettled chaos of the formless multitude… The cross is indeed one of the oldest symbols of structure and order” (p. 176).
In the Christian religion, the cross becomes a universal symbol of the unity of life and death. In “Andrei Rublev”, same as in his other films, the director resorts to the symbolism of the cross emphasizing that many of the characters “bear their own cross” (Figure 3).
Another archetypal symbol used by Tarkovsky is the image of a temple. By showing a ruined temple in “Andrei Rublev”, the director creates an image/symbol of the destruction of the world’s spirituality. A similar symbolic meaning of the ruined temple in “Ivan’s Childhood” is an image of the nation’s misery.
Of an ambiguous nature is Tarkovsky’s image of the protagonist, the Old Russian icon painter being an “alter ego” of the director himself. Rublev is not only the central protagonist of the film but also a sort of moral essence with which the other characters are compared. The “passions” of his existence are the state of the artist’s soul, the anguish of his conscience unwilling to put up with the injustice and cruelty of life (Figure 4).
The main humanistic problem of the film is the attitude to a person and the human community. The bearers of two opposing ideas on this issue are two brilliant artists, two opposites, Andrei Rublev and Theophanes the Greek, and the dispute between them – about the meaning of life, the purpose of art, good and evil, faith and faithlessness – is the climax of the film. Theophanes believes that people need fear and only the thought of God’s inescapable retribution for their sins can halt their innate wickedness and ignorance. The role of art is to bring people to their senses and shows them all the terrors awaiting them. As indicated by L. Anninskii (2012), the issue here lies in “how pernicious the truth is, for you cannot add light to dark. The tragedy in the film is internal; it is rooted in the nature of things, not in a forceful external influence” (p. 141). Tarkovsky, defending the position of Andrei Rublev, argues that despite all the contradictions of life,
“we must see the rational grain that is only emerging and will certainly win… Rublev as an artist, expressing the thought of the people, reflected the moral ideal to which he called. That is why he is great” (Kosinova & Fomin, 2016, p. 231).
A powerful chord of this life-affirming theme sounds in the last novella of the film – a young master Boriska, ragged and dirty, casting a giant bell, the ringing of which acquires an allegorical meaning: talent, as a gift of God, should not be silent, it must serve the people, the future generations. The self-sacrifice of the artist serves to harmonize existence, developing the spirit of man and society as a whole (Kirillova, 2016) (Figure 5).
Already beyond the film’s storyline, as its conclusion, we see on the screen the fragments of Andrei Rublev’s icons including his famous “Trinity” as a symbol of Faith, Hope, and Love. The problem of the meaning of creativity is continued in the film “The Mirror” (1974) structured as a confession of the artist about himself, the life of his family, and his mother. The metaphor “of time and self” became the philosophical basis of this monologue film. C. Gray (2015) notes that
““The Mirror” is the greatest masterpiece of Tarkovsky. It is also of the most unconventional form. Autobiographical and personal to the greatest extend, it unfolds with the associative logic of a dream allowing the memories to be reflected in the tumultuous national history of Russia”.
“The Mirror” merges the past and the present, documentary footage and personal memories, the private life of the family and the fate of the whole “crazy 20th century”, and the feeling of Tarkovsky’s own guilt toward his loved ones and the sorrow of human civilization. It is a film about Time and the transformation of reality, the transition from existence to existence, from a particular era to Eternity. The mirror in the film is a metaphor for the human soul, the spirit. Art, according to Tarkovsky, is also a mirror that helps one not only to comprehend the world, to comprehend the truth but also to understand themselves.
“The Mirror” that has become “an act of social and human self-knowledge and self-identification” (Turivskaia, 1991, p. 247) lacks specific examples of self-sacrifice, however, it is implied by the entire life of the hero’s mother who gave her love and life away for her children and sacrificed everything for their future. The themes of Motherland and Mother merge in the author’s mind as something whole and indivisible. The dominant theme of the film is the idea of the difficult fate of kindness which is not something abstract but lies in the real deeds and actions of a person (Figure 6).
Fantastique as a metaphor for comprehending personal spirituality
The theme of self-sacrifice is also at the core of Tarkovsky’s films belonging to the science fiction genre – “Solaris” (based on S. Lem’s novel) and “Stalker” (based on the novel “Roadside Picnic” by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky). In both cases, the literary concept has undergone a fundamental change: on the screen, fiction has become a means of comprehending reality. The main plot of “Solaris” (1972) is removed from earthly reality: the events take place in Space, at the scientific station of Solaris – the mysterious Ocean, the planet of the brain. However, in its own way, Tarkovsky’s science fiction plot reflects the time when the comprehension of the Unknown was already associated with real human spaceflight (Figure 7).
Tarkovsky sees the main goal of his screenplay in revealing the spiritual competence of an individual proving that the problem of moral firmness and responsibility pervades our entire existence manifesting itself not only on Earth but also in the mysterious Cosmos. Preserving the composition and storyline of Lem, the director created a film-reflection on the essence of the moral. Tarkovsky’s Solaris is a kind of universal mind, an alienated intellect, an alienated morality. In the encounter with the “alien”, in the comprehension of the “alien”, an individual is tested for their spiritual strength. The fantasy in the film comes into its own at the moment when the “solarist” heroes, scientists Gibarian, Sartorius, and Snaut, try to fight against the “guests” – the revived images from their past. The materialization of conscience in the guise of a person or event becomes the main moral line of the film. The “moment of truth” also comes for psychologist Kris Kelvin after his arrival on the space station where he encounters his past.
Hari, a woman he used to love and to whom he was guilty, appears in the flesh: a loving and suffering woman turns out to be a reanimated memory, a visitor from the world of the dead. But it is she who becomes a “flash” of light, illumination for the hero, and love is the main measure of the relationship between man and the Ocean. The hero is ready to sacrifice himself, his earthly life, his future for this “ghost”, a “phantom” of his ex-wife. But Kris is a researcher who is there to study human contact with “alien” intelligence, with the Cosmos. And Hari decides to leave him forever, voluntarily sacrificing herself to give creative freedom to the man she loves (Figure 8).
By taking his characters through the test of the ?osmos, the “alien” intelligence, Tarkovsky creates a nostalgic image of the Earth as a paternal home, as the epicenter of culture and civilization, proving that a human needs only a human.
In “Stalker” (1980) the author observes three people caught in an extreme situation. The characters and the situation are not merely connected by the plot but are allegorical, just like the characters in Tarkovsky’s previous films. In this “trinity”, the Stalker is the moral core of the film, and it is he who embodies spirituality, anti-pragmatism, he is the bearer of the very truth for the comprehension of which the Writer and the Scientist want to cross the “threshold of the room” where the cherished wish comes true (Figure 9).
The philosophical context of the film is evident in the landscape of “The Zone” which is dominated by biblical meanings. This can be seen both in the line of coastal bushes and in the fluidity of the waters, one moment cascading with the stream and the other mirroring the islands, on which people somehow fit. The heroes themselves, in accordance with the director’s philosophical allegories, embody the “eternal”: the Stalker reflects spirituality, faith, uncompromising devotion to an idea, the Writer represents skepticism and faithlessness, and the Scientist personifies worry for the fate of science and humanity. No miracle happens in the film: no one ever crosses the cherished “threshold” (Figure 10).
Only in the finale do the heroes discover the same eternal truth. This revelation is a simple human feeling – the love of the tired, long-suffering Stalker’s wife who performs her imperceptible, sacrificial feat; the love of the Stalker himself, who has sacrificed a normal human life, his tenderness for his crippled daughter. Love, according to Tarkovsky, is the miracle that can combat cynicism, faithlessness, and empty theorizing about the hopelessness of the world (Figure 11).
“Stalker” that became the last film of A. Tarkovsky filmed in his Motherland “captures a moment of some apocalyptic despair (“the time is out of joint”) of the artist himself…” (Turivskaia, 1991, p. 248) and ended up introducing him to the global issue of the “end of the world”. This is what Tarkovsky’s foreign films also tell about.
From confession to sacrifice
“Nostalgia” (1983) filmed in Italy based on a screenplay by Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra was mainly pictured by the Italian press as a drama of a man longing for his home in a foreign land. However, the essence of the film goes deeper than that. The main character, writer Andrei Gorchakov, arrives in Tuscany in search of traces of a Russian serf musician who had once studied music there. This trip will be for Tarkovsky’s hero as much of a journey to himself as the flight to the planet Solaris or the journey to the Zone. Emphasizing that “the film is a sort of discussion about the nature of nostalgia that is much greater than simple longing” (Bachmann, n.d.). Tarkovsky raises the question of not only the drama of a creative individual but also of the drama of human civilization due to the spiritual separation of worlds and cultures.
“Nostalgia” is also a philosophical parable about humanity’s path to finding its spiritual wholeness, to harmony. The sentiments of Gorchakov trying to overcome his spiritual crisis are shared by a former mathematics teacher, Domenico, who the Tuscany villagers believe to be insane as he is constantly talking about the coming Apocalypse. Domenico travels to Rome to publicly burn himself at the statue of Marcus Aurelius… His sacrifice is a form of protest against the cynicism and soullessness of modern society (Figure 12).
The final scene of the film is metaphorical: the hero with a burning candle is trying to walk across an ancient pool filled with water to understand where and when humanity stumbled and civilization ended up at a standstill. During his sacred act, the hero dies: his heart cannot withstand the strain (Figure 13). Not only the last shot but also the entire film is polysemous as new integrity emerges within it – the shots that unite the Russian countryside and the hills of Tuscany into something native and relative.
His last film, “Sacrifice” (1986), set in Sweden, Andrei Tarkovsky devoted entirely to the problem that constitutes the “credo” of his work. “Sacrifice” is 24 hours in the life of Alexander, a former actor, now a teacher of aesthetics, his wife, daughter, and young son, two maids, the doctor who treats this mentally devastated family, and the letter carrier who recites Nietzsche and convinces Alexander to play a leading role in a tragifarce about a worldwide disaster. The protagonist is tormented by the agony of tragic loneliness intensified not so much by the rift with his wife as by the silence, the dumbness of the Little Man (Figure 14).
A significant part of the film’s prologue is a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Adoration of the Magi” in Alexander’s office. The camera zooms in on a fragment (mainly on the infant accepting his predicted future from the sorcerer) and then gives a general overview of the Gospel story. The baby Jesus, who is worshipped as a future martyr and redeemer, becomes a kind of “code” for the film “Sacrifice”. The growth of the messianic motif is a pattern in the evolution of Tarkovsky’s moral philosophy. In this film, which became his testament, the influence of personal circumstances – a terminal illness and worry for the fate of his son Andrei, to whom the director dedicated his last work “with hope and faith” – is evident.
“Sacrifice” begins with a scene in which Alexander and the Little Man are trying to revive a withered tree. The father tells his son the parable of the Japanese monk who watered the same dry tree for years until it blossomed. This parable is known to go back to the vow of penance. The very act of sacrifice runs through three story layers in the film. And three archetypes accompany it. The first one is the archetype of the Tree that reappears in the finale as the father’s will to his son. Here the Little Man finally speaks: “In the beginning was the Word. Why is it so, Daddy?” (Figure 15)
While the Tree ties life and death together, what separates them is Water and Fire. Virtually in all of Tarkovsky’s films Water is an environment hostile to mankind; it is oblivion, the all-destroying time. In turn, Fire signifies a higher spiritual life. Fire is purification, it is memory, and it is immortality. The tree will not turn green and the son will not speak unless the father makes a sacrifice breaking the vicious circle of existence even at the cost of his own sanity. Alexander’s self-sacrifice is burning his own house and parting with his past. The hero’s spiritual awakening is in the realization of guilt both for his life and for the chaos of the collapse of the world (Figure 16).
Andrei Tarkovsky contributed to the spiritual salvation of humanity and the world, which has become much more open to dialogue in the 35 years since the great artist’s passing thanks to globalization and digitalization. But has it become morally better?
Conclusion
Summarizing the study, we can note that the most significant element in the philosophy of A. Tarkovsky’s work is the concept of self-sacrifice closely connected with other concepts of the spiritual sphere, such as Love, Truth, and All-forgiveness. At the core of Tarkovsky’s philosophy lies the idea of self-sacrifice in the name of love as particularly valuable and contrary to the cynicism, pragmatism, and soullessness of modern society. The paramount mission of an artist is to influence the spiritual development of a person and to improve the world as a whole. The creative heritage of Andrei Tarkovsky will continue to assist in the comprehension of these processes for a long time.
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